Wireless networking has been continually growing in its ubiquity over the years. For example, access point stations (APs) that operate according to the media access control and physical layer specifications standardized in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 family of wireless networking standards are presently found in homes, businesses, public facilities, transportation vehicles, and even wider areas such as being deployed to provide coverage throughout some cities. Client stations (STAs) are commonly integrated into a variety of electronic devices, such as personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and other portable computing devices, televisions, media players, and other appliances, cameras and other data-gathering devices, medical equipment, and countless other applications.
Wireless communications are generally conducted over defined channels in the frequency spectrum. Recent advances in the technology have introduced a number of features to improve the data communications throughput that APs and STAs can support. One such feature is variable bandwidth selection, which works by allowing stations to combine multiple channels that are found to be available for communications by transmitter-receiver pair. While it is desirable to increase the data communications capacity with greater bandwidth allocation for a communication session, using greater bandwidth increases the communication session's susceptibility to interference. A major source of such interference are other wireless networking communications taking place in the same vicinity as the communication session of interest. Interference is a dynamic phenomenon in that it may be present at one moment and absent at the next. One challenge for system designers is to make use of the available clear-channel capacity as it varies with the varying presence of interference.